Silent computer

Alternative means of lowering the hard disk noise: Hot switching off

All modern effective means of noise insulation of hard disks have one essential shortcoming: labour-intensiveness. At that the final product has weight of three kilogrammes and fills one third part of useful space of the case. This makes utterly inexpedient such solution of the problem for “moderate” silence lovers who usually approach the modding from position of optimal balance between the result and effort. This article is right for such people. The lowering of noise achieved by this means can’t be, of course, compared with the effect of “adult” systems; on the other hand it is very cheap. The idea is simple: switched off hard disk can’t make noise. Most users have standard two-disk configuration:• HDD1: System \ programs• HDD2: Games \ films \ file dump Such division means that the second hard disk turns idle and makes surplus noise. Respectively an idea appears to switch it off when it is unnecessary. You may ask why we don’t use built-in function of operating system. I answer: because it suffers from incurable drawback which lies mainly in the fact that disks can’t be controlled separately. It means that the system hard disk will stop together with the game disk; as a result of this, Windows will hang up for some seconds at every file operation until the disks run up properly. Frequent parking of heads is also not good for the hard disk. Moreover, Windows XP particularly has a bad habit to run up all the disks regularly even if they are not appealed to; thus you will not be able to sleep easily.

So, I decided that I couldn’t put up with all this discomfort and thought up an alternative means that allowed switching on and switching off the rarely used hard disk when it was necessary for us and separately from the other hard disk. To realize this modding we need such components:Hardware: a couple of Molex, double-row toggle switch, half meter of wire.

Molex in this case is a part of cooler adapter connector 3pin ->molex, toggle switch is made of a weak power unit.

All began when one day my neighbour, he is Automatic Control Engineer, came and started to beg me to give him one diode. When I asked him why, he typed modding in a search engine. And it had a great effect on me. I was sick about it. Maybe there is nothing accidental in the world and this modding seed fell into good soil. All my life I was interested in design.